PDC - not me

Well, now that the PDC has sold out, I guess I can say definitively that I won't be attending. Back when I first heard about this year's PDC, I assumed that I would be attending. And the truth is, I probably would be attending if I wasn't in the midst of a big release cycle and buried in hard-core DHTML coding. Nonetheless, as summer progressed and I learned more about the PDC contents, I curiously found myself less interested that I was initially. Yes, I, like many of my fellow bloggers, had fallen victim to Longhorn Lethargy. As fully geek-enabled as I am, I just can't get excited about an operating system that's at least 2 years away from being released, and probably 3-4 years from being widely deployed. As a software developer, I get paid to develop software that people can actually use, and anything Longhorn related is ways from fitting that criteria.

This isn't to say that I'm not interested in what's in Longhorn. God, I'm so ready for WinFS, it's killing me - I find the hierarchical file system to be one of most profoundly limiting elements of current computing platforms. But I'm having a hard enough time keeping track of all of the knowledge that I need today - I can't afford the brain storage for info that won't be applicable until 2006 at the earliest.

Another big topic of the PDC is Yukon, and unfortunately that's not too interesting to me either, albeit for different reasons. My company's product has to support multiple database platforms, and that pretty much kills any of the killer benefits of Yukon. Believe me, I wish it wasn't so, but it is.

So that leaves Whidbey. I'm VERY interested in Whidbey. The more I hear the better it sounds - kick ass improvements all over the place, from the CLR to WinForms to ASP.NET. It sounds like this is going to be the release that gets hard-core VB6-heads off their butts and into the managed world. Unfortunately, it looks like Whidbey is further out than I originally expected. This ain't no 2001 PDC, where we got release candidates of the stuff.

So I'm bummed that I'm missing the Whidbey portion of the show. Fortunately, it looks like their will be legions of reporters doing near-real-time onsite journalism, in the form of PDCBlogger.net. Something tells me it'll be almost like being there.

I also would have enjoyed putting some faces to names that I'm seeing in the blogging community. Perhaps another time. And I was so looking forward to rolling around in a dumpster and then introducing myself to Rory Blyth with a big hug. ;)

As a side note, a Q&A section was added to PDCBloggers for the various panels that are taking place at the PDC. Cool idea. I'd also love to see a more general and open “register your PDC question here“ site. Something where anyone (in particular non-attendees) can post a question, and anyone that attends can post an answer. Anything like that out there?